The term show trial is a pejorative description of a type of highly public trial in which there is a strong connotation that the judicial authorities have already determined the guilt of the defendant. The actual trial has as its only goal to present the accusation and the verdict to the public as an impressive example and as a warning. Show trials tend to be retributive rather than correctional justice. The term was first recorded in the 1930s.[1]
Such trials can exhibit scant regard for the principles of jurisprudence and even for the letter of the law. Defendants have little real opportunity to justify themselves: they have often signed statements under duress and/or suffered torture prior to appearing in the courtroom.
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In the late 17th century, various people in Salem, Massachusetts were accused of practicing witchcraft and consorting with the Devil in the Salem witch trials. Nineteen people were executed, one was killed, and five died in prison.
The Dreyfus affair was a show trial in France in 1894, where a Jewish captain, Alfred Dreyfus, was accused of spying for Germany.
The trial of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927 was one in which two anarchist Italian immigrants were accused of an armed robbery in Massachusetts. Both were executed, despite international appeals.
The Chicago Seven show trial was one in which anti-war protestors at the 1968 Democratic National Convention were tried for crimes against the state.
Show trials were a significant part of Joseph Stalin's regime. The Moscow Trials of the Great Purge period in the Soviet Union are characteristic.
The authorities staged the actual trials meticulously. If defendants refused to "cooperate", i.e., to admit guilt for their alleged and mostly fabricated crimes, they did not go on public trial, but suffered execution nonetheless. This happened, for example during the prosecution of the so-called "Labour Peasant Party" (Трудовая Крестьянская Партия), a party invented by NKVD, which, in particular, assigned the notable economist Alexander Chayanov to it.
Some solid public evidence of what really happened during the Moscow Trials came to the West through the Dewey Commission. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, more information became available. This discredited Walter Duranty, who claimed that these trials were actually fair.
Following some dissent within ruling communist parties throughout the Eastern Bloc, especially after the 1948 Tito-Stalin split[2][3], several party purges occurred, with several hundred thousand members purged in several countries.[4][2] In addition to rank-and-file member purges, prominent communists were purged, with some subjected to public show trials.[4] These were more likely to be instigated, and sometimes orchestrated, by the Kremlin or even Stalin himself, as he had done in the earlier Moscow Trials.[5]
Such high ranking party show trials included those of Koçi Xoxe in Albania and Traicho Kostov in Bulgaria, who were purged and arrested.[3] After Kostov was executed, Bulgarian leaders sent Stalin a telegram thanking him for the help.[5] In Romania, Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu, Ana Pauker and Vasile Luca were arrested, with Pătrăşcanu being executed.[4] Stalin's NKVD emissary coordinated with Hungarian General Secretary Mátyás Rákosi and his ÁVH head the way the show trial of Hungarian Foreign Minister László Rajk should go, and he was later executed.[5] The Rajk trials led Moscow to warn Czechoslovakia's parties that enemy agents had penetrated high into party ranks, and when a puzzled Rudolf Slánský and Klement Gottwald inquired what they could do, Stalin's NKVD agents arrived to help prepare subsequent trials. The Czechoslovakian party subsequently arrested Slánský himself, Vladimír Clementis, Ladislav Novomeský and Gustáv Husák (Clementis was later executed).[4] Slánský and eleven others were convicted together of being "Trotskyist-zionist-titoist-bourgeois-nationalist traitors" in one series of show trials, after which they were executed and their ashes were mixed with material being used to fill roads on the outskirts of Prague.[4] By the time of the Slánský trials, the Kremlin had been arguing that Israel, like Yugoslavia, had bitten the Soviet hand that had fed it, and thus the trials took an overtly anti-Semitic tone, with eleven of the fourteen defendants tried with Slánský being Jewish.[6]
The Soviets generally directed show trial methods throughout the Eastern Bloc, including a procedure in which confessions and evidence from leading witnesses could be extracted by any means, including threatening to torture the witnesses’ wives and children.[7] The higher ranking the party member, generally the more harsh the torture that was inflicted upon him.[7] For the show trial of Hungarian Interior Minister János Kádár, who one year earlier had attempted to force a confession of Rajk in his show trial, regarding "Vladimir" the questioner of Kádár:[7]
| “ | Vladimir had but one argument: blows. They had begun to beat Kádár. They had smeared his body with mercury to prevent his pores from breathing. He had been writhing on the floor when a newcomer had arrived. The newcomer was Vladimir’s father, Mihály Farkas. Kádár was raised from the ground. Vladimir stepped close. Two henchmen pried Kádár’s teeth apart, and the colonel, negligently, as if this were the most natural thing in the world, urinated into his mouth. | ” |
The evidence was often not just non-existent but absurd, with Hungarian George Paloczi-Horváth’s party interrogators delightedly exclaiming "We knew all the time—we have it here in writing—that you met professor Szentgyörgyi not in Istanbul, but in Constantinople."[6] In another case, the Hungarian ÁVH secret police also condemned another party member as a Nazi accomplice with a document that had actually been previously displayed in glass cabinet of the Institute of the Working Class Movement as an example of a Gestapo forgery.[6] The trials themselves were "shows", with each participant having to learn a script and conduct repeated rehearsals before the performance.[6] In the Slánský trial, when the judge skipped one of the scripted questions, the better-rehearsed Slánský answered the one which should have been asked.[6]
Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu were condemned to death in a Stalinist-style trial,[8] wherein even their forcefully assigned lawyers began accusing them of having committed capital crimes, instead of defending them.[9] There were absolutely no proofs offered for their alleged crimes, just mentions of the name of the crimes they would have had committed in the opinion of the prosecutors and of press reports about their alleged crimes.[9][8] E.g., the accusation of genocide remains unproven to this day. They were also accused of saving USD 1 billion in foreign accounts, and even today there is no proof of such secret accounts.[9][8] The judges' verdict offered the possibility of making appeal to a higher court, but the condemned were killed five minutes after the court reached the verdict.[9][8] One of their lawyers has motivated before the execution that since the condemned do not recognize the court, there is no way left for making appeal to the verdict, and therefore the verdict should become final.[9] Romanian law prohibited carrying out death penalties in less than ten days since the verdict remained final and irrevocable.[10] After their execution, death penalty was abolished in Romania.[11]
Nicolae Ceaușescu said that he does not recognize the court,[9][8] and lawfully seen he seems to have been correct about that. The person signing the decree for organizing the court (Ion Iliescu) lacked any credentials for doing it, except that of being one of the leaders of the coup. The decree was handwritten in a toilet of the Romanian Department of Defense.[12] Later, the leaders of the coup said the decision to kill the Ceaușescus was necessary in order to stop the terrorists from attacking the new authorities, but it seems that there were no terrorists active.[13]
Before the execution Nicolae said: "We could have been shot without having this masquerade!"[8]